7 ms·

Huawei P30 Pro alleged to be querying China servers

46 points by kpU8efre7r 8y ago

tomupom 8y ago
This isn’t particularly surprising. It’s becoming more and more common hearing about these stories, the last one I remember being Nokia HMD and Xiaomi both sending packets to Chinese servers.
- A2017U1 8y ago
  I have a Xaiomi Android One phone and it only pings google servers, most activity is from Google Play Serives which many Android apps require to function, have never seen a Chinese server in the logs. It's probably a different story with the MIUI OS. Sinkholing all requests the most concerning one Ive found is Google analytics running as root continually trying to dial out every few minutes. It doesn't give up and keeps retrying even after hours of failed requests. This is without any phone/internet usage.
deepVoid 8y ago
Android phones are querying servers in the US all the time.
deepVoid 8y ago
iphone found to be querying servers in the US, discovered 10 years ago.
deepVoid 8y ago
This kind of smear campaign against Huawei is unprecedented and politically motivated in the history of telecommunication technology.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- 0x54D5 8y ago
  I don't know of any American or European phones sending data to .gov domains right after unboxing.
- thatfunkymunki 8y ago
  Was it really necessary to make 3 substance-free top-level comments on this topic?
  - phyzome 8y ago
    Well, two of them were useful, although somewhat redundant with each other. Would have been better combined into one.
- nutcracker46 8y ago
  Smear? No, own the facts: Huawei phones (and Chinese phones generally) collect data for the Chinese police state.
mark_l_watson 8y ago
Sending to Chinese government servers or Huawei servers? Not a convincing article. I feel uncomfortable with what seems to me to be a campaign against Huawei at the same time our government is worried about being competitive in 5G tech. I could be wrong through, I didn’t believe that Russia would dare to meddle in our election until there was hard evidence.
- gwright 8y ago
  I thought it was common knowledge that the USSR and Russia have a long and continuous history of engaging in disinformation campaigns and covert actions of all kinds. But based on the way the Russian election meddling story has been reported over the last 2+ years apparently I was wrong. Lots of people seem to have been surprised by these activities. The most disturbing aspect of this ignorance is that apparently our own intelligence agencies were among the ignorant.
  - TaylorAlexander 8y ago
    Our intelligence agencies are not ignorant of these things. They’re just pretending they are and we’ve believed it.
    - javagram 8y ago
      What is the source for this? My understanding is the only one claiming the Intelligence agencies were unaware of Russian hacking and disinformation campaigns is the President, since he fears the legitimacy of his election is undermined by recognizing that Russian hackers/propagandists were leaking stolen emails to Wikileaks and posting memes on Facebook. The intelligence agency assessments themselves, as publicly reported, have consistently said there were Russian efforts to interfere with the election campaign.
      - A2017U1 8y ago
        The idea that this is contained to one election is laughable. This has been going on forever across the world. Wikipedia has an extensive article citing numerous academic studies on the matter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_electoral_intervention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_electoral_intervention > the country intervening in most foreign elections is the United States with 81 interventions, followed by Russia (including the former Soviet Union) with 36 interventions from 1946 to 2000
nigga_u_lyin 8y ago
The funny thing is that Huawei isn't even a very compelling brand. Like, even before the big freak out, no one was waiting in line around the block for the latest Huawei doodad. If kids got a Huawei thingamajig for Christmas, they'd probably be a little pissed off, and toss it in the corner to be forgotten. Here and there, you'd see a random person with something they picked up as a stop gap device because they smashed the screen on their good phone. Maybe. So now, every other week, noise, noise, noise? Huawei is the devil? Who gives a fuck?
est 8y ago
Anyone have seen the list? https://github.com/pe3zx/huawei-block-list/blob/master/master.txt https://github.com/pe3zx/huawei-block-list/blob/master/maste... Looks like a troll.
unscaled 8y ago
It seems like this is a side-effect from using baidu.com as a connectivity test domain: https://github.com/pe3zx/huawei-block-list/blob/master/analysis.md https://github.com/pe3zx/huawei-block-list/blob/master/analy...
- dirtyid 8y ago
  Also cursory search of ExploitWareLabs highlights lack of publish rigor from previous expose last year. Juice: >Our research team studied the video and we have several reasons to doubt its authenticity. We’ve conducted a thorough audit over the last 48 hours based the few details that are in the video and didn’t find anything. We reached out the researcher and instead of replying he removed the video*. We’ll communicate if indeed there is a risk. https://avleonov.com/tag/exploitwarelabs/ https://avleonov.com/tag/exploitwarelabs/ Tl;DR an amateur with no presence outside of facebook did not actually find what state level security experts tried to find for 10 years.
- JohnTHaller 8y ago
  If it's using Baidu, then China can likely use the phones users to DDoS targets like they did with github.
momofarm 8y ago
I think google ads know more YOU than China, why don't you just cut your cord? He even know what's my favorite porn site, I don't believe china will know that better :)
SethTro 8y ago
In the last couple of hours the author rolled back some of their comments. They way I'm reading this, they were seeing DNS requests to beian.gov.cn which was worrisome. Now they say those are the result of manually visiting baidu.com which makes more sense. See https://github.com/pe3zx/huawei-block-list/blob/master/analysis.md https://github.com/pe3zx/huawei-block-list/blob/master/analy...
- netsharc 8y ago
  It's hard to read on account of the dodgy use of English, but this smells of "amateur security researcher". Of course it feeds the narrative of Huawei paranoia so it makes it to the HN front page. (I'm not saying Huawei is innocent but this article surely is no smoking gun).
jka 8y ago
I'm of the opinion that only something radical like a new platform and/or device shift (i.e. away from smartphones to some other form factor, or a new, open, network-local-by-default mobile operating system) is likely to save us from this. All contemporary smartphones leak a ton via DNS and various background sync processes. Perhaps scrappy developers from emerging markets are more egregious in violating expected norms, but these outcomes are pervasive at the moment across the whole ecosystem.
Gurathnaka 8y ago
I'm trying to figure out what exactly this is getting at? Is the worry that these requests to random Chinese servers are nefarious or is this some random piece of software pinging a server for some tiny piece of information? “ICP Beian” stands for the process of obtaining the Business ICP registration number that allows you to host your website on a Mainland Chinese server. [0] So these communications could be literally anything on the phone and all we know is that it's communicating with a server in mainland China? [0] https://www.tmogroup.asia/entering-china-ecommerce-icp-beian-must-knows-in-2017/ https://www.tmogroup.asia/entering-china-ecommerce-icp-beian...
- nutcracker46 8y ago
  Do tell, why my Huawei P30 Pro should contact Chinese servers without my awareness or consent?
  - chmod775 8y ago
    Why should my iPhone 8 contact servers in the US without my awareness or consent? Because it was developed by an American company and runs software written by an American company. If I don't trust them I might as well throw the device away now. Is this really not obvious?
- code_duck 8y ago
  “some random piece of software pinging a server for some tiny piece of information” that would be called ‘phoning home’ and has the potential for significant information disclosure (IP, location, phone status, likely other information).
free652 8y ago
Would be nice to see what they are doing to generate those DNS requests.
dang 8y ago
Url changed from https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3685669 https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3685669, which points to this.
kyriakos 8y ago
Every windows and ios device also queries US domains. Not everything is done maliciously.
ASalazarMX 7y ago
> It is unknown whether there are any differences in firmware for different countries/regions. It is perfectly known that Huawei sells Chinese and Global editions of their phones. It's a pity there's so much vagueness when reporting that you can't even know which edition or firmware were they testing. I think we'll be doing a service to ourselves by ignoring vague reporting about IT security and decide based on documented and repeatable reports.

46 points by kpU8efre7r 8y ago

This isn’t particularly surprising. It’s becoming more and more common hearing about these stories, the last one I remember being Nokia HMD and Xiaomi both sending packets to Chinese servers.

A2017U1 8y ago
I have a Xaiomi Android One phone and it only pings google servers, most activity is from Google Play Serives which many Android apps require to function, have never seen a Chinese server in the logs. It's probably a different story with the MIUI OS. Sinkholing all requests the most concerning one Ive found is Google analytics running as root continually trying to dial out every few minutes. It doesn't give up and keeps retrying even after hours of failed requests. This is without any phone/internet usage.

deepVoid 8y ago

Android phones are querying servers in the US all the time.

deepVoid 8y ago

iphone found to be querying servers in the US, discovered 10 years ago.

deepVoid 8y ago

This kind of smear campaign against Huawei is unprecedented and politically motivated in the history of telecommunication technology.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
0x54D5 8y ago
I don't know of any American or European phones sending data to .gov domains right after unboxing.
thatfunkymunki 8y ago
Was it really necessary to make 3 substance-free top-level comments on this topic?
- phyzome 8y ago
  Well, two of them were useful, although somewhat redundant with each other. Would have been better combined into one.
nutcracker46 8y ago
Smear? No, own the facts: Huawei phones (and Chinese phones generally) collect data for the Chinese police state.

mark_l_watson 8y ago

Sending to Chinese government servers or Huawei servers? Not a convincing article. I feel uncomfortable with what seems to me to be a campaign against Huawei at the same time our government is worried about being competitive in 5G tech. I could be wrong through, I didn’t believe that Russia would dare to meddle in our election until there was hard evidence.

gwright 8y ago
I thought it was common knowledge that the USSR and Russia have a long and continuous history of engaging in disinformation campaigns and covert actions of all kinds. But based on the way the Russian election meddling story has been reported over the last 2+ years apparently I was wrong. Lots of people seem to have been surprised by these activities. The most disturbing aspect of this ignorance is that apparently our own intelligence agencies were among the ignorant.
- TaylorAlexander 8y ago
  Our intelligence agencies are not ignorant of these things. They’re just pretending they are and we’ve believed it.
  - javagram 8y ago
    What is the source for this? My understanding is the only one claiming the Intelligence agencies were unaware of Russian hacking and disinformation campaigns is the President, since he fears the legitimacy of his election is undermined by recognizing that Russian hackers/propagandists were leaking stolen emails to Wikileaks and posting memes on Facebook. The intelligence agency assessments themselves, as publicly reported, have consistently said there were Russian efforts to interfere with the election campaign.
    - A2017U1 8y ago
      The idea that this is contained to one election is laughable. This has been going on forever across the world. Wikipedia has an extensive article citing numerous academic studies on the matter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_electoral_intervention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_electoral_intervention > the country intervening in most foreign elections is the United States with 81 interventions, followed by Russia (including the former Soviet Union) with 36 interventions from 1946 to 2000

nigga_u_lyin 8y ago

The funny thing is that Huawei isn't even a very compelling brand. Like, even before the big freak out, no one was waiting in line around the block for the latest Huawei doodad. If kids got a Huawei thingamajig for Christmas, they'd probably be a little pissed off, and toss it in the corner to be forgotten. Here and there, you'd see a random person with something they picked up as a stop gap device because they smashed the screen on their good phone. Maybe. So now, every other week, noise, noise, noise? Huawei is the devil? Who gives a fuck?

est 8y ago

Anyone have seen the list? https://github.com/pe3zx/huawei-block-list/blob/master/master.txt https://github.com/pe3zx/huawei-block-list/blob/master/maste... Looks like a troll.

unscaled 8y ago

It seems like this is a side-effect from using baidu.com as a connectivity test domain: https://github.com/pe3zx/huawei-block-list/blob/master/analysis.md https://github.com/pe3zx/huawei-block-list/blob/master/analy...

dirtyid 8y ago
Also cursory search of ExploitWareLabs highlights lack of publish rigor from previous expose last year. Juice: >Our research team studied the video and we have several reasons to doubt its authenticity. We’ve conducted a thorough audit over the last 48 hours based the few details that are in the video and didn’t find anything. We reached out the researcher and instead of replying he removed the video*. We’ll communicate if indeed there is a risk. https://avleonov.com/tag/exploitwarelabs/ https://avleonov.com/tag/exploitwarelabs/ Tl;DR an amateur with no presence outside of facebook did not actually find what state level security experts tried to find for 10 years.
JohnTHaller 8y ago
If it's using Baidu, then China can likely use the phones users to DDoS targets like they did with github.

momofarm 8y ago

I think google ads know more YOU than China, why don't you just cut your cord? He even know what's my favorite porn site, I don't believe china will know that better :)

SethTro 8y ago

In the last couple of hours the author rolled back some of their comments. They way I'm reading this, they were seeing DNS requests to beian.gov.cn which was worrisome. Now they say those are the result of manually visiting baidu.com which makes more sense. See https://github.com/pe3zx/huawei-block-list/blob/master/analysis.md https://github.com/pe3zx/huawei-block-list/blob/master/analy...

netsharc 8y ago
It's hard to read on account of the dodgy use of English, but this smells of "amateur security researcher". Of course it feeds the narrative of Huawei paranoia so it makes it to the HN front page. (I'm not saying Huawei is innocent but this article surely is no smoking gun).

jka 8y ago

I'm of the opinion that only something radical like a new platform and/or device shift (i.e. away from smartphones to some other form factor, or a new, open, network-local-by-default mobile operating system) is likely to save us from this. All contemporary smartphones leak a ton via DNS and various background sync processes. Perhaps scrappy developers from emerging markets are more egregious in violating expected norms, but these outcomes are pervasive at the moment across the whole ecosystem.

Gurathnaka 8y ago

I'm trying to figure out what exactly this is getting at? Is the worry that these requests to random Chinese servers are nefarious or is this some random piece of software pinging a server for some tiny piece of information? “ICP Beian” stands for the process of obtaining the Business ICP registration number that allows you to host your website on a Mainland Chinese server. [0] So these communications could be literally anything on the phone and all we know is that it's communicating with a server in mainland China? [0] https://www.tmogroup.asia/entering-china-ecommerce-icp-beian-must-knows-in-2017/ https://www.tmogroup.asia/entering-china-ecommerce-icp-beian...

nutcracker46 8y ago
Do tell, why my Huawei P30 Pro should contact Chinese servers without my awareness or consent?
- chmod775 8y ago
  Why should my iPhone 8 contact servers in the US without my awareness or consent? Because it was developed by an American company and runs software written by an American company. If I don't trust them I might as well throw the device away now. Is this really not obvious?
code_duck 8y ago
“some random piece of software pinging a server for some tiny piece of information” that would be called ‘phoning home’ and has the potential for significant information disclosure (IP, location, phone status, likely other information).

free652 8y ago

Would be nice to see what they are doing to generate those DNS requests.

dang 8y ago

Url changed from https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3685669 https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3685669, which points to this.

kyriakos 8y ago

Every windows and ios device also queries US domains. Not everything is done maliciously.

ASalazarMX 7y ago

> It is unknown whether there are any differences in firmware for different countries/regions. It is perfectly known that Huawei sells Chinese and Global editions of their phones. It's a pity there's so much vagueness when reporting that you can't even know which edition or firmware were they testing. I think we'll be doing a service to ourselves by ignoring vague reporting about IT security and decide based on documented and repeatable reports.